Human rights, harm, and climate change mitigation

Abstract

A number of philosophers have resisted impersonal explanations of our obligation to mitigate climate change, and have developed accounts according to which these obligations are explained by human rights or harm-based considerations. In this paper I argue that several of these attempts to explain our mitigation obligations without appealing to impersonal factors fail, since they either cannot account for a plausibly robust obligation to mitigate, or have implausible implications in other cases. I conclude that despite the appeal of the motivations for rejecting the appeal to impersonal factors, such factors must play a prominent role in explaining our mitigation obligations.

Keywords:

• Human rights
• harm
• non-identity problem
• future generations
• Simon Caney
• Elizabeth Harman
• David Boonin

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to audiences at the 2015 Association for Social and Political Philosophy Conference, the 2015 Society for Applied Philosophy Conference, and the 2016 Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference. Amy Sepinwall provided helpful written comments along with valuable discussion. I also benefitted from discussions with Bert Baumgartner, Megan Blomfeld, Will Braynen, Vince Buccola, Mark Budolfson, Joe Campbell, Peter Conti-Brown, Nico Cornell, Blake Francis, Molly Gardner, Steve Gardiner, Michael Goldsby, Mark Goodwin, Gwen Gordon, Lisa Herzog, Rob Hughes, Hyunseop Kim, Alex Levitov, Andrew Light, Sarah Light, Brad McHose, Kieran Oberman, Eric Orts, Julie Rose, Debra Satz, Emma Saunders-Hastings, Liam Shields, Patrick Taylor Smith, and Tim Weidel.

Notes

1. The seminal discussion of the non-identity problem is in Chapter 16 of Parfit (1984).

2. It is estimated, for example, that the average surface temperature of the Earth increased by 0.85°C in the period between 1880 and 2012 (IPCC 2014, 2), and that this has led to a negative overall impact on crop yields (IPCC 2014, 6). Recent research has also found that climate change has made major contributions to floods, droughts, coastal erosion, and wildfires, and impacted terrestrial and marine ecosystems, food production, and human health and economic well-being (IPCC 2014, 7).

3. Fiona Woollard makes a similar point about the need to address the NIP in order to account for our mitigation obligations, despite the fact that our continuing to pollute may also negatively affect some people who would exist whether or not we continue to pollute (2012, 678).

4. It is, of course, virtually certain that different mitigation policies would lead to the existence of different numbers of future people, so that Parfit’s principle Q does not itself have any implications about which policy should be chosen. However, climate change does not seem to be a case of the type that raises the most difficult challenges for views that take impersonal considerations to bear on our obligations to future generations. That is because it is most likely that failure to mitigate would lead to the existence of a smaller number of future people, who would, on average, be worse off than the larger number of people who would likely exist if more aggressive mitigation measures are taken. And any view that takes impersonal considerations to bear on what ought to be done in different-number cases will hold that causing a greater number of better off people to exist is preferable to causing a smaller number of worse off people to exist. Taking Q as an example of the type of principle to which we might appeal, then, does not undermine the central line of argument that I develop in the paper.

5. Once again, here, and throughout this paper, I set aside the challenges raised by the fact that our actions now will also affect how many people will exist in the future.

6. The most prominent defender of such a position is Caney (2005, 767–768; 2006; 2008; 2009; 2010a; 2010b; 2012). Others who have pursued versions of this approach include Bell (2011, 2013); Shue (2011, 293–295); Meyer (2003); Huseby (2010).

7. This view is characteristic of contractualist approaches in ethics; see, for example, Scanlon (1998) and Kumar (2003, 106).

8. He allows that other considerations might play a role in grounding our mitigation obligations (Caney 2008, 537, 553), so it is open to him to allow that the impersonal factors that I claim we must appeal to are also relevant. But he does claim to endorse a ‘rights-centered approach’ to grounding our mitigation obligations (2009, 228; 2010a, 70–71), and I will argue that rights cannot play the central role in grounding our mitigation obligations, even if other considerations, including impersonal ones, are permitted to play supporting roles.

9. See, for example, De George (1981). For a somewhat less skeptical view that nonetheless denies that we can, in non-identity cases, violate the rights of future people whose lives will not overlap with our own, see Gosseries (2008).

10. Parfit suggests a claim that is similar to this (1984, 358–360).

11. This seems obvious in cases, such as the one discussed in the text, in which the relevant harmful effect is foreseeable. But it seems to me that an action of mine now can come to constitute a rights violation in virtue of something that happens at a later time even if the later event is unforeseeable to me.

12. Shiffrin (1999) and Benatar (2006) endorse views about the nature and moral significance of harm that suggest that causing people to exist is always wrong, or at least always profoundly morally fraught. But it is possible to hold that being caused to be in certain conditions grounds a legitimate complaint against actions that both caused one to be in those conditions, and were necessary conditions of one’s coming to exist, without holding that any of the conditions that are found in a typical life are among those that ground such complaints. The challenge for those who aim to appeal to a view of this type in order to explain our mitigation obligations is to articulate a principled basis upon which to distinguish the conditions that ground legitimate complaints in non-identity cases from those that do not, and to explain how drawing the distinction in the way suggested can account for a plausibly robust set of mitigation obligations, without committing us to unacceptable views about when causing people to exist is permissible or impermissible in other cases. It is this challenge that I will argue cannot be met by the views that I will discuss.

13. Caney does not reject more demanding conceptions of human rights, but claims that we need only rely on a minimal conception in order to ground our mitigation obligations (2010a, 75–76). I will argue, first, that the minimal conception is in fact insufficient to ground our mitigation obligations, and, second, that a more demanding conception commits us to implausible implications in particular kinds of cases in which new people are brought into existence.

14. As an anonymous reviewer pointed out, it may be that very demanding mitigation efforts would be required of us just in order to avoid causing climate change-related deaths, serious illness, or lack of access to subsistence goods. Even if that is the case in the actual world, however, a low-threshold human rights-based view will have implausible implications in cases in which minimal mitigation efforts would suffice to avoid causing any of these human rights deficits, while modest additional efforts would substantially improve the quality of life for future people.

15. With respect to climate change we are, of course, not in a position to ensure that people who will live at a particular future time, say T₂₀₀, will have lives above any particular threshold, since even if we did take on substantial burdens in order to attempt to protect the climate and conserve resources, these efforts may be thwarted by those living in the intervening period, if they were to return to high rates of emission. At the same time, it is in principle possible that our failure to mitigate now could fail to cause people living at T₂₀₀ to have lives below any particular threshold, since those living in the intervening period could take on heroic levels of sacrifice in order to protect the climate for future generations. The fact that the actions of agents in the period between our actions and T₂₀₀ will affect the conditions of life at T₂₀₀ in significant ways makes it difficult to specify precisely how our actions now could constitute violations of the rights of those who will live at T₂₀₀. This constitutes an additional challenge for defenders of human rights-based accounts of the grounds of our mitigation obligations, though I do not assume that it cannot be met.

16. For a view of this sort, see Huseby (2010).

17. As an anonymous reviewer has pointed out, proponents of the view that those who are caused to exist below a threshold of well-being have a harm-based complaint against actions that caused them to exist can combine that view with, for example, a utilitarian or prioritarian principle that determines which option, among those that do not involve bringing anyone into existence who will fall below the threshold, should be chosen. Views that include both a threshold account of harm that determines when individuals have complaints on their own behalf against actions that were necessary conditions of their coming to exist, and a principle such as utilitarianism or prioritarianism that determines which option among those that will not harm anyone should be chosen, are not undermined by my argument in Section 2. That is because these views do give weight to impersonal considerations above the harm threshold, and so will imply that in at least some cases we are obligated to sacrifice in non-identity cases in order to ensure that better off people come into existence rather than different, worse off people. Since my aim is limited to arguing that any view that does not give any weight to impersonal considerations will not be able to account for a plausible set of mitigation obligations, the fact that my argument does not rule out views that combine a threshold account of harm with a principle that is sensitive to impersonal considerations does not threaten the argument.

18. Shiffrin offers a similar account of the permissibility of performing necessary surgery. On her view, it is permissible to harm a person, even without her consent (so long as one cannot obtain either consent or refusal), if doing so is necessary in order to prevent her from suffering even greater harm (1999, 127). It is not, however, permissible to harm a person in order to bestow what Shiffrin calls ‘pure benefits,’ which improve a person’s condition, but do not constitute removal or avoidance of harm. This is the case even if the person would clearly be better off both suffering the harm and gaining the benefit than she would be avoiding the harm but failing to acquire the benefit (1999, 127–130). Harman, on the other hand, allows that the fact that an action would provide benefits can justify performing it despite the fact that it will harm a person, at least in cases in which the person harmed would not exist if the action that harms her were not performed. This is why, on her view, typical cases of procreation are permissible (2004, 97–98). Indeed, Harman even allows that the fact that an action will benefit oneself can provide reasons that might justify performing an action that will harm another person, at least in cases in which the person harmed would not otherwise exist (2004, 101–102).

19. It is particularly striking that Harman allows Patty’s interest in having a child to provide reasons that might justify her in conceiving a child that she knows will be deaf, and therefore harmed, since she seems to think that being caused to be deaf is a significant harm, and also endorses a strong asymmetry between the strength of reasons against harming and the relative weakness of reasons to benefit people, including oneself (2004, 98). Since being childless is not, on her view, a harm, it would seem that the benefit to Patty would have to be very large in order to justify conceiving in cases in which, absent the benefit to her, doing so would be impermissible.

20. A similar point can be made in response to Molly Gardner’s harm-based account of the wrongness of causing a child with poor health to exist in a case in which one could have caused a different, healthy child to exist instead (2015). On Gardner’s view, a person X harms another person Y if X causes Y to be in a state with at least one component feature that is such that, if Y both existed and was not in that state, she would be better off with respect to the relevant feature(s) of the state that X caused her to be in (2015, 434). This view implies that a person who causes a child to exist in poor health harms the child, since if the child both existed and was not in poor health, then the child would be in good health, and therefore better off with respect to the feature of the state that she was caused to be in that explains why she was harmed by being caused to exist. The fact that causing the child in poor health to exist would harm her in this way, on Gardner’s view, provides a strong reason against causing her to exist, and since there is no reason of this kind not to cause the healthy child to exist, the reason against harming the would-be child with poor health explains why it would be wrong to cause that child to exist. Assuming, however, that it is morally worse for a person to cause a child to exist in poor health when she could have caused a different, healthy child to exist, than to cause a child to exist in similarly poor health (but with a life that is nonetheless well worth living overall) when the option of causing a healthier child to exist instead is not available, a full account of the conditions that explain the (degree of) wrongness of causing the child in poor health to exist in the first case will have to include the fact that an impersonally better alternative was available.

21. This view is suggested by Woollard (2012, 686–687).

22. I am not certain that we should accept it, but I will not challenge it here.

23. Indeed, even if the notion of benefitting merely possible people can be given sense, it would seem perverse to think that we ought to, for example, give priority to possible people who would be worse off as compared with possible people who would be better off, when deciding to whom to provide the benefits of a life worth living.

24. After all, if we think that the fact that one person, A, would have a higher quality of life going forward than another, B, provides us with a strong reason, all else being equal, to save A, then we will be committed to thinking that, generally speaking, we ought to save economically prosperous people in preference to economically deprived people. This, it seems to me, is a clearly unacceptable result.

25. Indeed, on Boonin’s view, it would be permissible to continue to emit at high levels in Delayed Climate Change even if those who would come to exist 200 years from now, and after that, would have lives that are just above the threshold at which they would be worth living.